Don Melton, former Engineering Director of Internet Technologies at Apple, talks to Guy and Rene about assembler on the Apple II, open-sourcing Mozilla, building Nautilus, creating WebKit and the Safari browser, teaching bears to dance, and cleaning cusses from code bases.

Don Melton, the man hired by Scott Forstall to build a web browser for the Mac, and later iOS, is continuing his post-Apple turn as a blogger, this time reminiscing about the day Steve Jobs introduced Safari at Macworld 2003. Writing on donmelton.com talks, in part, about the reaction to their use of Konquerer's KHTML instead of Firefox's Gecko rendering engine:

Don Melton, who was originally tasked by Scott Forstall to create WebKit and the Safari browser for OS X, and later WebKit of iOS, has retired from his job as engineering director of internet technologies, and begun writing. One of his writing projects is a blog, and two of his recent posts shed some light on the people and events behind Safari.

Safari has been on the iPhone since the first version launched in 2007, and has been steadily improved, year after year, version after version, ever since. iOS 6 follows the same, steady, evolutionary pattern, addressing long standing user pain-points like image uploads, and providing parity with features from other browsers, like Chrome's tab sync. It also makes Reading List more robust, and provides an interesting way for websites to alert users about, and move them into, apps.

iOS users are the most active on the web, claiming 65.27% of the total market share compared to Android, in distant second with 19.73%, and Java ME further behind still with 10.22%. BlackBerry trailed with 1.87%, though even a year ago it was only around 3%. Google still rocks the mobile search engine chart, accounting for 91% of all searches from a tablet or smartphone. Out of all web traffic monitored, mobile account for 8.2% of activity, which is up from around 6% last year. All of this, according to metrics company NetMarketShare's most recent web analytics survey.

Google Chrome for iOS was released today, so we naturally put it up against the default browser, Safari. We conducted some basic tests, such as load times (which revealed a slight lead for Chrome in two tests), JavaScript (where Safari had a significant lead), HTML5, and CSS (roughly equivalent).

A new trick in Safari for iOS 6 announced at WWDC 2012 today was Smart Banners. These are clever little banners that slide down from the top of a screen and offer those browsing from an iOS device the ability to launch directly into an app or download it from the App Store.